Nonetheless, it is one of 46 languages in North America that are being spoken by significant numbers of children as of 1995 (Goddard 1996).

[3] The tendency for secrecy is a continuing general Pueblo reaction starting in the 17th century in large part due to the oppressive persecution (including public executions and torture) of Pueblo religious practices by the colonial Spanish.

The Taos community has been particularly guarded about revealing their language (and culture) to outsiders when compared with other eastern pueblos in New Mexico.

[4] Due to secrecy practices, the details of language preservation are not known outside of the community.

Taos belongs to a northern sub-grouping on the Tiwa branch of the Tanoan language family.

It is closely related to and partly mutually intelligible with Picurís (spoken at Picuris Pueblo).

The Cultural Education Committee hopes to incorporate the Tiwa language into Head Start in the fall.

[6] According to one analysis, Taos has 18 consonants:[7] The alveolar flap /ɾ/ is found in loanwords from New Mexican Spanish.

Taos has three degrees of stress: primary, secondary, and unstressed, as well as three tones: high, mid, and low.

This symbols have roughly approximate values of corresponding IPA symbols except that the vowel transcribed as ⟨o⟩ by Trager is phonetically IPA [ɑ] and in Trager's phonemic categorizing a low back vowel (with rounding details irrelevant to the categorization).

Taos nouns can be grouped into four grammatical classes based on which number affixes are required for the singular and duoplural inflectional forms.

The class includes both native words and loanwords from Spanish (such as yàwo’óna "mare" from yegua, and prìmu’úna "cousin" from primo).

Membership of this class is represented by the following list of nouns (cited in the singular form).

Both classes include body parts, plants, natural phenomena, and man-made materials.

Demonstratives and some numerals are also inflected for number with different suffixes that agree with the noun that they modify.

For example, kò’óne "washing" consists of the stem ko‑ and the duoplural number suffix ‑ne.

The duplifix may be symbolized as ‑’V‑ where V represents the reduplication of any vowel that occurs at the end of the preceding noun stem.

The following examples show the patterning of reduplication and number suffixes found by Trager.